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screen printing => General Screen Printing => Topic started by: TCT on November 11, 2013, 09:25:31 PM
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How cold are people letting their production area go down to? Everyone that doesn't see below 50 degrees year round, bite me! :o The cold has kicked in here and every year I wonder to myself if I should put a secondary heating source in. During the day when the shirts are flying and the dryer is cranking, everything is fine. It is just that first thing in the morning it is usually a bit cooler and the ink is stubborn. The coldest it has gotten inside overnight was the upper 30's, but I would say it is usually upper 40's/lower 50's.
I just got a killer deal on a nice IR tube heater on Craigslist and I am trying to figure out if it would be best if I installed it at the shop, or if I get to bring it home for the garage! Sure is nice in the summer when the ink is all creamy, so my garage may have to stay wood burning for another year...
Where is everyone else? Thoughts?
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60...minimum
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we didn't get a furnace in the print shop until last February.... we still don't have heat in the office/showroom/sign shop...it's stupid cold....we have space heaters in the small rooms, ink room, embroidery but with all that, you can still see your breath...the ink room is the warmest, probably in the low 60's...my office has a space heater too but it's all block wall, so it's still balls ass cold. to run the dryer in the print shop, we have to turn the gas off to the furnace, our gas line is a bit too small to supply both....all of this should be resolved in about a month or so, not a huge deal, but nothing works well in the cold...i feel your pain....it's snowing right now btw.
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Not too bad yet here, we still have pretty nice weather.
It will be 40-50 ish usually at the worst. I currently use one of those jet engine type kerosene heaters, and it only takes ten minutes or so to warm up my little shop (thankfully because it's loud!)
One year, we had a long enough cold spell that allowed me to make some lager in one end of the shop at a pretty steady 45.
Now, the question may be, does anyone have any special way of treating (and heating) their ink when it does get cold?
I often bring the next day's inks into the house. Otherwise, I use my drying cabinet.
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I have toyed with the idea of moving/making a ink room in the basement. It stays pretty even thought the year, but the idea of having to go downstairs every time to get ink or whatnot is not appealing.
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Homer and MK162 where are you guys located?
Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk
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outside atlanta, really close to where the Braves will be playing in 2017!!
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Just over 60 degrees. It's to hard to get rolling in the morning if we are below that. That being said we are only in 5k sq ft.
Plus the employees bitch.
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I have a programmable thermostat and only let it get down to 55F at night and weekends. A balmy 62 during work hours, and of course the dryer and flashes heat things up when in use. I'm thinking of building a heated ink cabinet for the plastisols.
We heat our house primarily with wood in the winter, and I'm looking to find a good deal on a used catalytic wood stove for the shop too. An easy 10-20 hour burn times with 1 load. I love to go out and get wood when I have time, but I don't have much of that. so I called up the guys who sell wood and made signs for them in exchange for several loads. 8)
My last job working for someone else had an owner who was stingy with the heat and it drove me nuts. He would even come around and take peoples space heaters.
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Watch any combustibles with the IR tube heater!
Repeat line one.......
Turn our heater to 45 @ night
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Guess I'm lucky we have central heat and air in our whole building, but during winter I'm thinking maybe 40 on our worse day and that's when we first walk in, other than that we be good!!!! and I did mean we be good LOL
Darryl
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Through the weeks maybe 50 at worst, weekend it gets maybe 40 at worst. As we turn heaters down.
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65, I'm home base with a central heat.
When printing, 85-90 :)
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Set the thermostat to 50 over night 45 on the weekends. Move the white and poly inks into the screen room which is set at 85 once the cold sets in.
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Sit your white ink on your dryer in the morning.... always works for us.
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cold freaking cold, I am upstate NY about 50 miles south of lake Ontario. I have an old building that holds onto heat like a sailor on shore leave holds money........so I do not heat over night.
It gets see your breath cold and the ink is stiff enough to walk on. My wash out room is small, and we heat it overnight to protect things like emulsion from getting too cold.
Ink we warm up over the floor registers (forced air heat) or if we are smart enough to plan place the ink for the first job of the day in the heated room overnight.
I have often thought of building a ink warming cabinet or getting an old refrigerator and heating with 25 or 40 watt bulb controlled by a thermostat but I never seem to get there.
mooseman
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Our main offices and embroidery area is central heat and programmed. But our Printing area is wide open about twnety feet high and has one gas heater. We leave it set to 50 and thats that. Common inks go in the screen room which has a small space heater keeping it nice and balmy. The print area being so huge and tall never actually gets to 50 with the heater atleast not at floor level. You can just about see your breath. there is an industrial ceiling fan installed that pushes the heat down some what.
We also plastic wrap our over head door since it is the biggest area of heat loss.
This is in Connecticut BTW. And I drove into work this morning through a nice snow squall, flakes the size of half dollars.
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hahah, you guys have snow already...that's funny.
it's supposed to get into the 20's tonight, that should be fun. of course the weather hasn't been right at all for the lows overnight. literally at 11PM the low is listed at 44, when I wake up, it's around 36. How can they be that far off only a few hours away?
my dad was really stingy with the heat, we didn't have gas hooked up before because the only appliance that used it was the furnace, it was $50-60 a month just to have gas, even if you didn't use a therm. with the gas oven it made sense to hook the furnace up to it and heat the warehouse and office.
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hahah, you guys have snow already...that's funny.
it's supposed to get into the 20's tonight, that should be fun. of course the weather hasn't been right at all for the lows overnight. literally at 11PM the low is listed at 44, when I wake up, it's around 36. How can they be that far off only a few hours away?
my dad was really stingy with the heat, we didn't have gas hooked up before because the only appliance that used it was the furnace, it was $50-60 a month just to have gas, even if you didn't use a therm. with the gas oven it made sense to hook the furnace up to it and heat the warehouse and office.
I grew up in a 239 year old historical house in Hartford. My father being from Sicily was beyond stingy for heat, growing up all we had was a couple nasty smelling kerosene heaters in the massive uninsulated house. It was crazy you literally walked 3 feet away from the heater and you were in the arctic. We also had a coal furnace that my father would make me shovel coal off a truck down a coal chute, that was always fun.
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I grew up in a 239 year old historical house in Hartford. My father being from Sicily was beyond stingy for heat, growing up all we had was a couple nasty smelling kerosene heaters in the massive uninsulated house. It was crazy you literally walked 3 feet away from the heater and you were in the arctic. We also had a coal furnace that my father would make me shovel coal off a truck down a coal chute, that was always fun.
but i bet that taught you to be thankful for what you have and the value of hard work...
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TCT, I'm near Buffalo NY.....once in a while, we take turns warming up in the ink room...we can handle the cold but it's the equipment that really suffers. takes a while to warm everything up for production.
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Radiant heat in the whole shop...stays at a nice 68 degrees or warmer all winter.
If the dryer is going it is almost too warm.
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Snow already, wow. I've always wanted it to get really cold and snow here but I bet a few days of it and I'd be ready for the usual 65 in the winter. It's been a little cooler than average here this year. We've already had a few significant cool fronts with a big one blowing in right now. 30 mph north winds this morning and I had to drive 20 miles straight into it on my way back from the airport in a vehicle that's shaped like a box with 34" tires so I was struggling to stay at the 80mph speed limit. I got 23 mpg on the way to the airport and 9 on the way back.
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Halfway between Boston and Worcester... 102 year old mill building, we never know what we're going to get. Some winter mornings we're below freezing, some days we get in and it's 85° and we have to open all the doors and windows...
Steve
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Yep New England weather is like a box of chocolates. Some summers we get 100 degrees easily with wicked humidity and some winters we get 4 foot snow storms. Then we get a stretch of rainy mild winters and a stretch of snowy cold as all hell winters. Its been spitting flakes for a couple days now, forecast has a possible t-shirt weather day in the future.
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Little brisk here..we just got heat in the shop 2 years ago..we had an exhaust fan that i had to block off..since we are in an old kitchen..The old oantry is where we keep the inks and screens..have a small space heater in there..when i had only the manual the high in the shop before heat was 45 degrees in the middle of winter..I figured if i wasnt warm i wasnt working hard enough..LOL
now we just have a wall unit that keeps it around 55 at night. Now that we have the auto dryer, we turn that on for the day and its 85 in there...we wear shorts...
Albany NY
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I'm in Massachusetts. Winter at my shop is always in the 50's.
They are just finishing installing a new heating system and I'm being told it will never be under 65. If this is true, I'm in heaven.
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Alan you are the type I said to bite me, with your 65 degrees! :D It was 15 degrees on my way in today, with the wind chill it was about 4 degrees. And it doesn't usually get cold here till January.
This will be our first year with the addition added on, while it is more sq. footage it also replaced a wall that you could see daylight coming through and had newspaper and hay used for insulation. So I am almost thinking it will be a toss up. We have central heat and air for the front half- office area and what used to be the embroidery room. With that there are like 5 vents that run in back off of that but that just keeps it above freezing.
One fortunate thing for us is this building has been retro fitted so many times there are odd things everywhere. There was a whole forced air HVAC system in the ceiling above 1/3 of the space. I ripped it out when we bought the building because it was not hooked up. I left the ducting in mainly because I didn't want to rip the ceiling down to remove it. But in the winter it serves a purpose again, the main trunk used to enter the ceiling directly to the left and above of our dryer outfeed. I just affixed 2 box fans directed into it, and when it gets warm in back I turn them on. That pushed extra warm throughout the whole first floor! It is nice, but I am most concerned about the early morning hours in the printing area(mainly the white and poly inks).
I am thinking I may clear some room under the infeed for the dryer to put the whites and poly inks. I am not super excited about that idea, but if I don't install that radiant tube heater here I am thinking that under the infeed may be my best option.
Thanks guys!
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I wish it would get real cold here then we might could sell some high dollar sweats and stuff, we don't even get a call for long sleeves much, by the time we get hard cold in January its warming up.
Darryl
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On days it gets real cold here, I just turn on the gas dryer about an hour before production. It alone keeps the room at a bearable temp.
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We barely use our warehouse heat, just fire up the dryer and let it warm it up out there.
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I'm just down the street from Frog, it ain't that bad here.
Production area stays warmer than the office due to the dryer and flashes.
We'll be moving the office back up to the mezzanine for the winter, heat rising
is a good thing sometimes.
Someone on the old old board posted a pic of their dryer venting setup. Basically they could
turn on/off a loop in the vent that used the escaping heat to heat the building. No reason
to waste that energy.
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Here in Florida... 8) It does get cold, but our AirJet gas dryer takes care of it in no time.
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not cold at all..whatever i keep my house at....when i rebuilt my home after katrina i insulated my one car garage and also ran an a/c duct to the garage....in the inter i keep my home around 73, so thats what my garage is.
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not cold at all..whatever i keep my house at....when i rebuilt my home after katrina i insulated my one car garage and also ran an a/c duct to the garage....in the inter i keep my home around 73, so thats what my garage is.
Man you southerners like your heat. In the summer I keep my place no higher than 68 and even then it can be hard to sleep.